Brothers use Internet to share strength-training knowledge

Mike DeDoncker

Friday

Aug 29, 2008 at 12:01 AMAug 29, 2008 at 7:11 PM

Josh and Tyler Fagan are former local football stars, teachers, coaches and workout fanatics. They’re ready to try their hand at becoming Internet entrepreneurs. The brothers, both of whom were all-NIC-9 performers at Boylan in the 1990s, have launched a group of Web site products designed to market their knowledge of strength training to everyone from beginning exercisers to serious athletes.

Josh and Tyler Fagan are former local football stars, teachers, coaches and workout fanatics. They’re ready to try their hand at becoming Internet entrepreneurs.

The brothers, both of whom were all-NIC-9 performers at Rockford Boylan in the 1990s, have launched a group of Web site products designed to market their knowledge of strength training to everyone from beginning exercisers to serious athletes. The star in their stable is portablestrengthcoach.com, which includes videos of 22 different exercises that can be downloaded to any portable media player.

“The same way as with music, you would just sync the videos to your media player,” Josh said. “Then, you would go to your movies setting and pick any of the videos that your downloaded. It would load and then give you complete video instruction on how to perform the exercise.”

The program, for which a buyer pays $37 to receive the computer link, is available in two formats so it also could be used from the desktop of a home computer. A template that allows users to design their own workouts and recipes for 12 smoothies for athletes are included.

“I came up with the idea while I was at a gym in town,” said Josh, who is certified as a personal trainer and as a strength and conditioning specialist with a master’s degree in kinesiology. “I always feel bad for people who don’t know what they’re doing in the gym because it seems like they have no direction.

“Not everybody wants a personal trainer standing next to them in the gym, but I thought this would fit the need for proper instruction for exercises. Now, people can go with a game plan in mind of what to do in the gym.”

A typical scenario, Tyler said, would be that the user would be at the gym with the 22 exercises loaded onto their media player. They could then choose the exercises they want to perform and see and hear how to correctly perform them.

“Even if they forget the exercises from the time it took them to get there from home,” said Tyler, a former strength and conditioning coach at the University of Illinois who also has a master’s degree in kinesiology, “the video is there to talk to them and no one has to know they have a trainer with them.”

Tyler said portablestrengthcoach.com is aimed at anyone who exercises, but they have four other sites, including 815bootcamp.com, which offers workout sessions from 6 to 7 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays at Brookview School, 1750 Madron Road.

The next session is scheduled for Sept. 8 through Oct. and the cost is $100 per person. Sign-up is available on the Web site.

Their other sites are improvingathletes.com, completetrainingforyoungathletes.com and injuryproofathletes.com, all of which offer programs and products for competitive athletes and local youth athletes.

“We’ve kind of been doing this in baby steps,” Tyler said. “We started forming ideas and products about a year and a half ago and we just launched our Web sites a month or two ago. This is what we do all day. When we’re not teaching other people, we’re training ourselves.”

Mike DeDoncker can be reached at (815) 987-1382 or mdedoncker@rrstar.com.